Daily Search Forum Recap: August 25, 2010

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

So Sad: Yahoo Finally & Officially Gave Up On Search
I really don't know why I am so upset, but I am. Probably not as upset as all those Yahoo Search engineers who are out of a job or as upset as Jerry Yang but I am really upset. Yahoo has been testing letting Bing power their search results then ramped it up last week. Then yesterday, officially flipped the switch in the U.S. and Canada. Yahoo no longer powers the underlying organic search results

Setting The Preferred Domain In Google Webmaster Tools Won't Hurt You
A quick SEO myth buster post for you. You know how you can set the preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools? Well, if you do that, you won't be deindexed, so don't worry. A webmaster asked this question in a Google Webmaster Help thread and Google's JohnMu replied. John said: No, setting a preferred domain name does not result in a site being deindexed. It is hard for Google to be more straightforward than that

Study: META Descriptions Very Important Search Results Click Through Rates
Dynamical.biz translated a new eye tracking study done Spanish (PDF here of how searchers look at the search results on a search results page. Here is the break down of the study, but before you look at it, let me define a "fixation" in terms of eye tracking studies. As per Wikipedia, a Fixation online eye tracking refers to the test subject fixing on a particular portion of the page. It is used to determine

New Google Merchant Feed Error: "Duplicate Offers"
There is a new error message that has been officially introduced for Google Merchant Center merchants. The new error is known as "Duplicate offers" and shows up when Google thinks "there are duplicate items in your data feed that should be removed." Google's Ronald from the Merchant Center team said in a Google Merchant Center Help thread: As some of you may have already noticed, we've introduced a new error message called "Duplicate offers" in

Google Cache Screwy?
A HighRanking Forums thread has many senior (old timer) SEOs complaining about the Google Cache. Let me quote one of my favorite online SEO personalities, "OldWelshGuy": Something is really wrong with the Google cache reporting or caching system. OK of late (last 6 months or more) there are times when you check a cache and there is no cache (or reason not to be cached), but that has been rare. Now it is all over

Google Alerts Adds "Updates" Type Option
Google Alerts has added an additional alert type to the bundle. The new type is named "updates" and likely gives you alerts when there are matches to Google's real time search index. Here is a picture: Google has been tweaking their Google Alerts system to make it more selective and more relevant recently. I wonder how adding "updates" to the mix might cause those relevancy tweaks to fall a bit, if at all? I assume